Chapter 5
The first week, time has no significance.
Being awake is a humongous effort and if I whine dramatically enough, Lindsey the nurse pumps a delicious cocktail in my veins that doesn’t give me nightmares but also doesn’t give me dreams. People come and go, discussing my arm; my recovery; my memory, or lack thereof.
They think I can’t hear them, but unfortunately, I hear it all.
When Doctor Parker is not alone, he’s with either Doctor Carter from Neurology or Doctor Taylor, also known as the best Orthopaedic in town. I grit my teeth in an attempt to stay present but keep yawning and squinting whenever they are around. My brain can’t focus—can’t follow anything they say.
The nurses plug and unplug stuff to my arms. They ask me to rate how much this or that hurts on a scale of ten. It’s eight, always an eight. I go through various machines and it’s a bit like being back at school. I’m doing well, but not well enough.
I wake up alone sometimes and the time on the monitor looks blurry. I repeatedly make a mental note to ask for a watch but I forget every time, so I just start counting to one hundred and back to zero until the hospital door opens.
Most often, who’s walking in is the very person who taught me the trick of counting to kill time: Ash.
He brings his books and magazines with him and he reads to me, just like he used to do when we were eleven and into collecting every issue of all the existing comics.
Ash would come over to my house and we would read for hours but while I got tired of it at some point, Ash wouldn’t.
He would start reading the stories to me then and every time it would get too complicated, he would flip the page over to show me the pictures.
He’d even make voices and recreate scenes for me, holding a black sock on his face to play Batman or wrapping a yellow blanket around himself to play Robin.
Whenever Ash shows up empty handed, he asks me random stuff. “Do you remember where you went to university?”
Duh.
“Do you remember the street we grew up in?”
Also yes.
I don’t tell him he sounds like a security question. I don’t tell him that I’d rather be the one asking the questions.
Other times, it is Lindsey the nurse who walks in the hospital room. “Just call me Lindsey, please.”
I nod in agreement, but she does not get it. I need to think of her as Lindsey-the-nurse. I’m too afraid I will forget who she is, alongside everything else.
Each time she appears, she makes a point of having me move something. “To avoid stiffness.”
Her reassuring tone has the complete opposite result. Stiffness is unavoidable, it has already happened. I can barely move on my own. My skin is itchy and my bones are all superglued together.
The first time my dad comes to visit, I’m barely conscious.
“Fordy.” Dad huffs as he walks in and the sight of him is incredibly comforting.
His long beard is slowly turning white and so is his curly hair.
He sits in the chair that is usually Ash’s and has only time to ask me how I’m feeling before I fall into a heavy sleep.
When I wake up again, I’m alone and the darkness outside tells me it must be night time.
???
I’m half-heartedly listening to Ash read a chapter from one of his favourite books out loud when Lindsey the nurse comes in one morning.
“Good morning Ash, good morning Ford. How is our bladder this fine morn’?”
That, together with the muscle atrophy and the breathing exercises is one of Lindsey’s obsessions.
She’s all about finding the right time to remove the catheter and helping me to the bathroom and not for the first time.
I’m in awe of nurses. I’ve been here for a little over a week and I’m already exhausted.
However, Lindsey is resolute as she waits for my answer.
“Alright, I think?”
“Good enough. We ought to start bladder retraining and I have been far too gentle with you, Mr. Hale. I blame your dimples.” With a wink, she gets to work.
When she starts telling me about a commode chair and how it works, I feel light headed. “N-no,” I mumble.
“Come again?”
“I’d rather- I want to try the bathroom.”
Lindsey the nurse chuckles. “We’ll save potty training for tomorrow, Ford.
Today we will see how you are managing your standing.
” Turning to Ash, she keeps talking to him.
“Doctor Parker has been rather concerned about his levels of alertness. At times he seems quite responsive but will have no recollection of it a couple of hours later. Doctor Taylor from Ortho did not give us clearance either.”
Ash hums in agreement but says nothing.
“I can sit up on my own.” I try to argue, reminding the room that I am, in fact, fully alert and responsive as we speak.
“That you can. You’re becoming an expert at dangling your legs off the bed.” Lindsey the nurse smiles at me but she’s unmovable: no trips to the bathroom yet, at least for the next few days.
I hate it, and when Ash offers to help, I chase him out of the hospital room.
“Boundaries, my friend,” I tell him and I pretend that he doesn’t look hurt, nor jealous when I end up accepting the help of the nurse.
With each passing day, I become more aware of just how deep my relationship with Ashley is in 2024.
When my dad comes to visit the second time, his hug with Ash is longer—a little weirder. It’s early afternoon and I am particularly drowsy, not in the usual car accident way, but in a delightful the-weed-hit-the-right-spot way. Nevertheless, I can follow their conversation much better this time.
My dad asks Ash, “And he forgot everything?”
I keep my eyes closed, my body perfectly still.
“Yeah. Greg, I don’t know what to say.”
In my entire life I have never heard Ash call my dad ‘Greg’ and I find myself being more alert after that.
“I thought he was dead. After the accident, I thought I’d have to…
But he wasn’t. If possible, it was worse.
They took him for all those surgeries and then he didn’t…
There was a tube coming from his mouth, and a loud machine, like a ventilator.
It looked so unnatural, he looked so weak.
And all those beeping, all those lights…
” Ash trails off and a desperate sob leaves his lips.
“He was so awfully still. I just wanted to yank everything off and hold him.”
It’s odd. All of this is.
When my mother drops by, worried and frenetic as ever, she holds Ash’s hand the whole time. They talk about family and the meaning of it and it makes no sense. I pretend I’m not in the room with them.
When Ash’s brothers show up, they all wish him the best of luck in a strangely affectionate way.
I wonder if I had ever been able to tell Martin and Edwin apart but this time I just blame it on the amnesia.
When a group of friends come to visit, they all ask Ashley how he is doing first. I can barely remember their names.
And finally, when a woman I cannot recognise knocks at my hospital door holding a children’s drawing, Ash gets so emotional he has to excuse himself from the room.
It makes me want to scream.
I am the one who does not remember two years of my fucking life.
I am the one with the stubborn headache; the cast around my arm; the legs that shake even when I bend them at the knee.
Me, the one who cannot use the bathroom without help.
Me, whose hair is like a bird nest of various different lengths from where the doctors had to shave it off.
Me, who has no idea what I’m doing in 2024 and how I got here.
I keep waiting for the urge to drink the sorrows away.
Everyone brings flowers and kind words and best wishes but none of them stay.
Only Ashley stays. Most nights, he sleeps by my hospital bed, holds my hand and he stares at me.
He doesn’t say much, and even if we’ve never needed many words to communicate, I miss the sound of his voice; the endless stream of conversation. I miss the life he used to radiate.
???
After the catheter is gone, my progress is faster.
Determined to feel like a human again, I beg Lindsey the nurse to help me change out of the hospital gown into a matching pair of soft sweats that someone must have dropped off for me.
Though I don’t recognise them as mine, the colour is a dead giveaway.
I have been committed to the all-black look since finishing university.
Doctor Taylor visits me with a physiotherapist. The visit is long and draining, but in the end, Doctor Taylor blesses me with his clearance: I’m promised I can ditch the commode chair once I’m able to support my weight for five minutes straight.
I accept the challenge, and the therapist instructs me to stand up a couple of minutes every few hours at first, holding myself on the bed.
The next day when Ash arrives at the hospital, I’m actually standing.
The good arm on the bed frame, the one in the cast balancing my weight and I’m standing on my own.
I can’t help but smile, feeling like Neil Armstrong must have felt when he first set foot on the moon.
Well, not quite, actually. Right here, I’m feeling gravity quite heavily and mourning the muscles I lost since the accident.
“Check this out!” I tell Ash a little out of breath. He beams at me in response and there is real pride written all over his face—real happiness.
Ash simply stands there in silence and just like every day, he studies me as if he cannot believe how lucky he is that I am alive, in the same room as him. He watches me in reverence and fascination but I have no idea why. We were in an accident and I still cannot remember anything.
“Good job,” Ash says and when I meet his gaze, I’m not in my hospital room anymore.